On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 20:18 -0800, Ben Munat wrote: > Well, it finally happened. My partner has gotten fed up with the snail's pace > at which the > latest versions of many apps become unmasked -- or even show up -- in > portage. PHP 5, > MySQL 5, Cocoon 2.1, etc., etc.
As another poster pointed out MySQL 5 is still alpha quality. Copied from their site today: MySQL 5.0 -- Development release (use this for previewing and testing new features) As for PHP 5, I still think it is beta quality. Not only based on bug fixes, but the fact that several key items in PECL and PEAR are still not functioning with PHP 5. This is a real show stopper in any production environment. If you really need this stuff, it is easy enough to just run everything ~x86 for a testing server. But for production? Only if you like things to be broken all the time. The PHP folks need to first figure out how to fix problems running with Apache 2 before running their mouths about how stable php5 is, but that's another rant all together. > He's gotten to the point -- helped along by a couple portage gaffes lately > (PHP/SNMP > conflict causing apache not to start, a MySQL upgrade killing libmysqlclient > and breaking > a number of apps, and my struggles (though probably my fault) with courier > the other day) > -- where he wants to explore other options. A *nix-geek friend of his has > been raving > about FreeBSD... and I have to admit that just about everything I've looked > for is in the > ports collection. > > However, since I've been doing 99% of the maintenance of this server, I want > to know what > I'm in for. So, I'm curious if anyone on the list also runs or has run > FreeBSD? If so, > what were your impressions? What pitfalls are there? What are the big > differences? If you > left BSD for Gentoo, why? > > It seems like the ports collection offers everything that portage does (it > was the > inspiration for portage, after all), but their devs are making the latest > versions > available and stable faster. Is doing "cvsup" is really the same as "emerge > sync" and > "make install" in a given apps directory the same as "emerge <thatapp>"? > Seems like > FreeBSD is a winner... what's the catch? > > Any and all thoughts welcome... If you run unstable alpha/beta quality software on FreeBSD, you'll have the same problem. I'm sure you won't find these packages in any stable branch on FreeBSD either. So he'll have to get used to the snails pace that stable software is released. It's just a fact of life no matter what server platform you are using. Wendall
